Like Carrion Men
by What Ithacas Mean
Summary: Aud Aeducan returns to Orzammar as a Grey Warden. To Orzammar's politics, the Deep Roads, and choices that affect the future of her people.
1. Misgivings

**Title: **"Like Carrion Men"

**Spoilers:** Potentially through to the end of the game.

**Disclaimer:** Not mine. There's no doubt on this issue.

**Notes:** This is one of the more interesting rpgs out there, I think, and certainly the one with the deepest level of world-building I've come across. And I find the Dwarven Noble character origin story one of the most interesting things in the whole game, so I'm going to play with it for a bit, possibly to the extent of a reasonably lengthy set of chapterlets. It annoyed me a little, lo these many moons ago, that there was never a sense of closure regarding the Aeducan exile at the end of "A Paragon of Her Kind".

**ETA: **I suppose I should be honest here, and admit to playing rather fast and loose with in-game chronology. What makes sense in terms of playability doesn't ring true to me when I try to think of it in real-world terms.

So rather than detouring all over the map, this particular brave band has an itinerary that looks like _Ostagar-Lothering-Mages' Tower-Redcliff-Haven-Redcliff-Orzammar_. I realise, in the game, that in order to complete the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest, one _has _to go to Denerim. On the other hand, assuming that Ferelden is a country larger than, say, the Isle of Man - how many times can one expect to be able to cross a country without being eaten by an archdemon, really?

Yeah. I'm handwaving all over the place.

* * *

**1.**

It was mid-afternoon in the Frostback Mountains, ten miles from the gates of Orzammar, when Aud of the Grey Wardens called a halt.

"Not that I'm complaining," Alastair said as he dropped his pack onto the hard earth with a dull thump and sank down on top of it, jingling mail and creaking leather, "But why are we stopping? We could make Orzammar by dusk, no problem."

Grey light slanted through the high clouds. Aud shaded her eyes, staring up towards the snow-covered peaks and the curve of the road through the pass. Spring. She'd never been in the Frostbacks in spring. It had been winter when Duncan led her out of the Deep Roads and - nameless, an exile, dishonoured - out of Orzammar. Forever, or so she'd thought.

If Duncan had ever told Alistair she'd once been an Aeducan, Alistair'd never shown it, not by a hair. She didn't think he knew. Lelianna could not know. As for Morrigan - well, she was Flemeth's daughter. But what were the Aeducans to the Korcari Wilds?

_Ancestors' bollocks. I have to tell them, don't I?_

"I'm not certain of our welcome," she said, and turned.

Sten had taken a bad wound in their last encounter with roving darkspawn, five days ago, a week out from Redcliff. The big qunari's usual silence hadn't broken until it became clear the slash - a great ugly curve down the side of his thigh - was badly infected. She'd found a farmstead whose folk were willing to take in a qunari giant and a Circle mage until the one could manage to heal the other: Wynne was good, but darkspawn-inflicted injuries were troublesome to treat, even for a mage.

The mabari hound had stayed with them. Reaver would serve well enough to defend them both, until the qunari healed enough to catch up. So it was only Alistair, Morrigan, and Lelianna who watched her from the scant shadow of the roadside boulders.

All of them were frowning.

"I know rumour has it King Edrin's dead," Alistair said, slowly, "but that can't have changed so much, can it? We're Grey Wardens, for the Maker's sake!"

"The dwarves of Orzammar have always honoured the Grey Wardens, no?" Lelianna's doubtful look matched Alistair's. "At least, so I heard it said in Orlais..."

Morrigan said nothing. But the quirk of her dark eyebrows was knowing, amused.

_Infuriating._ But Aud had come to expect that with Morrigan. You could rely on her sardonic wit - not to mention her utter pragmatism - if nothing else.

No. Not nothing else. _When choosing a friend, daughter, bear two things in mind. Can they use a weapon? And will they use it on your enemies?_ Her father's wisdom, that, on one of the few occasions he had actually offered her advice.

A pity one couldn't choose one's brothers.

"Then let me say that it's _my _welcome I doubt." Aud's voice was harsher than she intended, and she grimaced. "Sorry. Let's get a fire going, and I'll tell you my reasons over roast barleycake and rabbit, all right? It's cold in these damn hills, and _some_one," she glared at Alistair, forcing humour into it, "left me no cheese at breakfast."

"It wasn't me!"

Morrigan snorted. "Of course it was you, Alistair. You cannot blame your bad habits on the mangy dog when he is not here, now can you?"

#


	2. Words

"Like Carrion Men"

* * *

**2.**

The bickering - good-humoured this time, not something always to be counted on when Alistair and Morrigan were left together - continued while they rigged a campsite. Aud sought firewood in the thin roadside brush while Alistair and Lelianna pitched the tent in the shadow of a boulder. It being Morrigan's turn to cook, dinner was recognisable as food and came along swiftly over a flame as much fueled by magic as by the brown stalky ferns Aud managed to collect. (After the first couple of times, their little band had united in banning Alistair from the cookpot. As a consequence, he dug more than his share of latrine pits, but fewer people had to dash to them in the middle of the night.)

Aud dropped a last armload armload of dead ferns beside the tent and folded herself down across the fire from Morrigan. Alistair, sprawled lengthwise with his head pillowed on his back, glanced up with a grin. "It'sh ood!" he said with indistinct enthusiasm around a mouthful of barleycake.

Morrigan, turning a sizzling rabbit on the spit, met Aud's raised eyebrows blandly. "If he burns his tongue, t'will at least stop his chattering. Here." A flip of her wrist sent two flat brown barleycakes sailing across the fire. Aud caught them, wincing at the heat on her palms, and yelped a protest when Lelianna, quick as any lightfingered pickpocket, snatched them from her fingers and flopped with boneless grace onto the grass beside her.

"Alistair is right," the bard said, nibbling at one corner and grinning playfully at Aud's affronted stare. "Morrigan cooks well. But you were hungry, yes? I would not take food from your growling belly, and oh, how it growls!"

Aud reclaimed one of the barleycakes and leaned companionably into the other woman's shoulder. Lelianna smelled of pine and sweat and the fleabane she'd crushed into the seams of her clothes. Aud was reminded that she had always preferred women. And the Orlesian was beautiful.

_Keep your hands to yourself, you stone-blind fool. This war will kill you yet, and she deserves better._

"I told you I was unsure of our welcome at Orzammar," Aud said, when she had swallowed the barleycake. She wiped crumbs from her mouth with the back of her wrist, looked at the fire, not her companions. It was... hard, to make the words come. "You know Duncan recruited me into the Grey Wardens, Alistair. I don't know if he told you how."

"He didn't. He only said you were willing, and we needed you."

"Willing. Aye, I was that." Bitterly. "I'm dwarven, Alistair. It would've been an honour to join the Grey Wardens, had I come to them any other way."

"What do you mean?"

"The Assembly condemned me to the Deep Roads for kin-murder," she said, baldly, and did not look at their faces though she felt Lelianna stiffen beside her. "If I hadn't found Duncan there, my bones would've long since gone to feed the darkspawn. It was Trian Aeducan's death that doomed me, you see."

"If you killed him, one assumes he deserved it."

Morrigan's words. Despite herself, Aud snorted, met her dark eyes over the fire. "Trian? I daresay he did. We none of us were sinless, Morrigan. But it was Bhelen's will that killed him, and none of mine. I was a blind fool not to see it coming."

"_You're_ Edrin's daughter?" Alistair, food forgotten, gaped at her. "Aud _Aeducan_?"

"No longer," Aud said sharply. "I was cast out. My name stripped from the Memories and the rolls of my house. I am Aud only, now. And I cannot think the Assembly will take kindly to me turning up on Orzammar's doorstep as a Grey Warden demanding their aid. So you should be warned, before we reach it. If there is... unpleasantness, make sure you remember that our cause _must _come first. Regardless of what happens to me." Her appetite was gone. She stood, an edgy tension singing in her muscles, and settled the twin swords in their sheaths at her hips. "I'm going for a walk. Save me some of the damn rabbit."


	3. Exile

"Like Carrion Men"

**

* * *

3.**

"Aud Aeducan, by the Maker," Alistair said, in the silence that followed her departure, clearly shaken. "Well. This seems likely to be a problematic... problem."

"_I_ see no problem." Morrigan cut a leg off the rabbit, shrugged. "And if a problem comes, why then, we shall kill it." A thin, cold smile, as she wrapped the cut meat in a cloth and laid it aside. "T'will be good practice, do you not think?"

"Witch," Alistair said, tiredly, without malice.

"_That _would be my mother."

Lelianna stared after Aud's trail. "These Orzammar nobles... by the Maker's mercy, even a murderer could not deserve the kind of death the darkspawn give! To condemn an innocent -"

"Are you so sure she's innocent, Lelianna?" The pale cloudlight combined with firelight to throw Alistair's sharp cheekbones into high relief. His eyes were shadowed, doubtful. "The thing's I've heard about Orzammar politics... they aren't pretty. We only have her word she _didn't_ kill Prince Trian."

"I knew you were a fool." Savagely efficient, Morrigan cut the rabbit into quarters with her knife. "But you have obviously lost what little intelligence you may once have possessed if you begin to distrust our fearless leader _now_. There is no point in it. We are already committed to our quest, and whether you wish it or no, whether your little dwarf friend is guilty or no, we cannot avoid Orzammar. Or would you be a coward as well as a fool?"

"Oh, Maker!" Lelianna, exasperated, swatted Alistair when he made to reply. "Do not be such children! Squabbling will not help us, yes? Let us eat, and then, if Aud has not returned, one of us will follow her." 

* * *

A rotten pine had fallen, taking a neighbour with it, and left a clearing of bare pine needles wide enough for a full-grown human to take ten paces before running into a facefull of branches. A light breeze brought the breath of snow from the high reaches, a clean counterpart to dusty granite and warm leaf-rot. Aud was no Dalish elf, to love wild places and the things that dwelt there, but she had found more peace in the wilderness, even in the midst of slaughter, than she'd ever known in Orzammar's stone halls.

She drew her twin swords and started to practice forms on the uneven ground. She needed to find calm. Composure. Walking into Orzammar would be hard enough without doing it with an unsettled mind.

_I, the exile, meaning to return. Ancestors, what kind of fool am I?_

One with no choice, of course. Her ancestors would have understood that: the honour of the dwarves lay in keeping your given word to the letter, and dying on your feet.

Which left plenty of room for intrigue and betrayal like the one that'd ruined her. If she'd been harder, less honourable - if she hadn't waited for Trian or Bhelen to move _first_ and prove their intent -

She might be queen in Orzammar now, and have to deal with the hidebound bastard deshyrs of the Assembly. Not to mention the rest of her family, on whom she could _never_ afford to turn her back. At least the darkspawn were honest about trying to kill you. And killing them was less work, on the whole, than cajoling the deshyrs into making a decision.

It was why she'd never even been tempted to arrange an "accident" for Trian, pompous irritating bastard that he'd been. Let him have the Assembly: she'd have been happy with a command to lead into the Deep Roads. Reclaim some of the thaigs, or at least some of their relics, for the dwarven people: glory and honour and if she'd managed it right, she might've convinced the Assembly to make her a Paragon. Far better than a queen.

Bhelen, though. His had been an admirably neat plot. _I should've killed him the first time he tried to bribe Gorim away from me. _

Far too late for regrets.

Aud drove herself through the swordforms until sweat soaked the gambeson under her drakeskin scale and her breath rasped, painful, in her throat. When her forearms trembled hard enough that she had to stop or risk dropping the blades, she grounded the points, leaned on the hilts, and turned to face her watcher. "You look cold," she said, when she had breath enough to speak.

Lelianna hugged her arms around her under her cloak. The bard had been standing there half an hour, at least, and Aud - feeling a little guilty - tossed her her own from where it lay on the fallen pine. "Thank you," Lelianna said, and draped it around her slender shoulders. A hesitation. "My friend... We will stand with you, yes? Even should Orzammar shut its doors in our faces."

"They're more likely to throw me back down into the Deep Roads."

"Do you truly expect that?"

"Really?" Aud shook her head. "But then, I didn't expect it the first time, and depending on how Bhelen stands with the Assembly, he might want me safely dead and unable to avenge myself on him. Which would be sensible of him." Grimly: "I mean to, if I can. I owe it to Gorim, and to Trian. And even to my father, ancestors rot his bones."

Lelianna was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, it was soft, hesitant. "What was it like? Orzammar?"

"Ugly." Aud sank down onto the fallen pine. "Oh, the architecture is very grand. Beautiful. Overwhelming. Dwarves know stone and metal: it's in the blood. And the best of our best have been improving Orzammar's halls since the first Blight. But by the Stone, it's rotten inside. Orzammar eats its children. We lose more from the castes to the surface with every generation. Those who stay are obsessed with status. With tradition. And the deshyrs... I swear, pointless blood feuds have killed more of us than the darkspawn _ever_ did."

"You didn't like it there?"

"I survived it," Aud said, bitterly, and exhaled. "No. I loved it, the way you can only love your home. In the full knowledge of all its flaws and vices and ancestors know, they're many. But by the Stone, when you stand on the rim of the Diamond Quarter and watch molten rock steam in the crack of the chasm so many miles below -" Her cheeks were wet. She wiped her eyes, annoyed at herself. She said, more softly, "Even if Bhelen hadn't arranged to have me condemned, Orzammar would have eaten me too, eventually. I was too good at the game. In the end, I'd have had an 'accident' at one of my brothers' hands, or become one of the deshyrs I despised, too puffed up with my own pride to look at the world outside."

"I would," Lelianna said, unwontedly serious, "be sorry not to have known you."

"Thank you," Aud said, and looked up to meet her eyes. "I only hope you can still say the same tomorrow night."

* * *

Aud didn't flinch when the guard at the gate called her _exile_, though the temptation to put a sword through his sneer made her fingers twitch. The Captain of the Guard called her _kinslayer_, and her stomach twisted into tight knots of shame, but she didn't flinch. When Harrowmont's second all but accused her of being Bhelen's spy, she gritted her teeth and kept her hands carefully away from her weapons, and still she didn't flinch.

It took the barkeep at the tavern looking at her like shit on the bottom of a Dust Town boot to break her. "A room?" the sour, narrow little woman - short even for a dwarf - said, dubiously. "I don't want no kinslayers under my roof - even if you are a Grey Warden."

Aud clenched her fists. She had her pride. She would not kill this stupid daughter of a darkspawn and a diseased pig. She would not let anyone see her weep, or lose her composure even by a hair. She hadn't lost her composure when she'd learned she was to be _executed_, for the Stone's cursed sake. She wouldn't lose it now.

She _would not._

"Fine," she said, and heard her voice crack humiliatingly on the single syllable. Ice. She would be ice. "Alistair. Morrigan. Lelianna. I am sure this good woman has no objection to you sleeping in her beds and bathing in her water. You stay here. _I _will find somewhere else."

A shack in Dust Town, maybe. Tired as she was, the thought of a corner she could wedge herself into and sleep with her swords braced across her knees almost made her weep - she hadn't had a proper bath since Redcliff, and she hadn't slept in a proper bed since before Ostagar, neither the Circle of Magi nor Redcliff Castle being oversupplied with either as a result of their troubles. A pallet on the floor was a lot better than a blanket in the woods, but -

She severed that train of thought before it could hurt any worse, and stalked out of the tavern before her companions could protest.

* * *

Alistair followed her.

She expected the three of them had tossed a coin for it - or maybe drawn straws, since three was an awkward number for a coin toss, unless Morrigan had shrugged a shoulder and said, _It is no business of mine, I'm sure, _with her usual sardonic indifference. The game of _who's going to talk to the prickly little homicidal maniac_ this _time_? had a familiar rhythm.

She was sitting with her back to a wall at the edges of Dust Town when he caught up, watching a handful of casteless tossing dice listlessly in the shadow of a doorway. The bindings of her swordhilts cut into her palms. She could close her eyes and sleep - she'd wake if she were threatened: she'd had enough practice at light sleeping under her father's roof and in the Deep Roads even before this last year - but the hollow ache under her chest left her feeling light and brittle and not quite all there. It was a disturbing sensation.

Anger had kept her on her feet, those first few weeks after her exile. Anger, and the hard, cold pride of the Aeducans - it might no longer be her name, but it was still in her blood - that would be damned if anyone saw her break.

And after Ostagar, she'd duty, too. A bleak, doomed, thankless duty, but just because the world was ending didn't mean you didn't pick up your damn pack and soldier. Alistair looked to her. So did the others, fractious as they were. You didn't let your people down.

She wasn't angry anymore. Just tired. So blighted tired.

_Pick up your pack and soldier, soldier._

"Alistair," she said, when it seemed he was just going to stand there and stare at her uncertainly in the dim red light. "Problem?"

"Um," he said. "Er."

"That's not an answer."

"Ah. Well." And, all at once: "Well, you see, after you left, Morrigan persuaded the tavernkeeper to offer you a room, too. We thought you'd like to sleep in a bed tonight, so I came to find you."

Aud's eyebrows climbed into her hairline. "_Morrigan_?"

Alistair grinned, uncomfortable and embarrassed. "Well, I guess _threatened _is probably a better word than persuaded, but I promise, I wouldn't really have let her burn the place down, honest. But she was looking very, well, Morrigan, and if you don't come back I really think she will." Hopefully: "Please?"

Morrigan. Well.

"I know you don't trust her much," Aud said, and heaved herself upright. "But by the Stone, Alistair. I think I like her. Lead on, my prince. I could really use a bath."


	4. The Dark

"Like Carrion Men"

I'm pretty sure the little choppy sections aren't working so well as an editorial choice. Apologies.

* * *

**4.**

She killed Bhelen's thugs, when they were stupid enough to attack her. She killed her cousin in the Proving, and better men and women with him. She killed carta members, dusters too stubborn or too stupid to know when they were outmatched, or too desperate to care.

When Harrowmont said he needed someone to find Branka - mad Branka, Branka the Paragon, Branka the tinkerer, Branka the absolutely Stone-blind crazy - in the lost Ortan Thaig, she nearly told him to shove it up his hidebound arse.

_Duty, soldier._

But she didn't.

* * *

She left Alistair behind.

"You can't," he said, when she told him he had to stay in Orzammar. "Aud, you _can't_."

"No," she said, and caught his arm. He practically vibrated with tension under his mail. She was almost surprised he didn't rattle. "I _can't _risk both of Ferelden's last two Wardens in the Deep Roads. If something happens to me, you're_ it._ I've been in the Deep Roads before. So has Oghren. The only reason I'm taking Morrigan and Lelianna is because we'll need a mage, and neither Oghren or I are worth shit with a bow and we might need _that_, too. The fewer we are, the better our chances of finding Branka without bringing a horde down on our heads."

_And you're Maric's son._

She didn't say it. It would only have hurt him.

* * *

Oghren the Sot had the sense of humour of a dirty-minded schoolboy and smelled like a dead pig after a three-week bender, all grease and rot and booze.

But he could fight like a demon, and in the Deep Roads, you didn't ask for more.

Aud missed Alistair at her flank, shield-heavy, jingling in his mail. Solid, methodical, _there_. But he had no rock-sense, and mere human eyes weren't enough, in the dark tunnels where even the lichen-light along the stone failed to nothing and darkspawn hurled themselves from the cracks. It was all she could do in the worst of it to watch Lelianna's back - Morrigan being a witch and a shapechanger and more than capable, _look to your own back, Warden,_ of taking care of herself.

She missed him anyway.

* * *

They were four weeks in the dark.

Lelianna and Morrigan ran short of insults and bickering within two days. Afterwards they spoke only of pleasant things - insofar as Morrigan could _ever_ be pleasant - or of necessities. The dark closed in, beyond the passages nearest Orzammar, the ones the Legion of the Dead _had_ to travel on their long, dismal watch. To the humans, the comforting solidity of the stone would feel like the trap it was.

Aud felt it. In warm still air reeking of sulphur and carrion and the ancient/fresh geology of metamorphic rock and cooling stone. The taint burned in her blood. Her nightmares overran with slaughter and the archdemon screaming. At times she thought she could hear it when awake, grinding inside her skull like boulders. She tried to recapture the fierceness that had fueled her as a warrior, all the years she'd marched with the killing expeditions to the thaigs, or the rage that had sustained her when her exile began, but it wouldn't come, and she grew more hollow with every passing hour.

It seemed impossible that Oghren, wafting unmentionable fumes from the ancestors-be-damned brewery that was his pack, farting, snorting and picking his nose with broken-nailed filthy fingers, should stay oblivious. It seemed impossible that _anyone_ should stay oblivious. But he did.

It almost made her like him.

* * *

_First day they come and catch everyone. Second day they beat us, and eat some for meat_.

Hespith's flat, ruined voice made Aud's teeth itch. She could _smell _the taint in the other dwarf's flesh, bruised, ravaged, _polluted_. It made her _blood_ itch.

_Now she does feast, as she's become the beast._

Morrigan killed her, after. Hollow as she'd become, Aud had enough of herself left to consider it a mercy.

Not least because the broodmother was the Stone's own bastard to kill, and they could not permit Hespith to become a second.

* * *

"You're frightening the bard," Morrigan said, in a strange voice.

Aud studied the branch of the tunnel in front of them. Behind her, cradled in an outcrop of the wall, Oghren snored, and Lelianna lay slumped on her pack in the silent sleep of the truly exhausted. She rubbed the pommels of her swords in thought. They were _close_ to Branka. She could practically smell it, even over the stink of her own filth after almost three weeks with no water but the foul-tasting streams that trickled from the rock.

When she found the Paragon, Branka was going to die, Oghren or no Oghren. Branka had sacrificed her people on the altar of her obsession, and _you didn't do that._

You might stab your equals in the back. You might scheme for advantage and betray your superiors in rank, or arrange for members of a rival house to die in humiliating circumstances. But you kept faith with those who looked to you, by the Stone's black heart and the entrails of all the ancestors. You didn't spend your people's lives for no better end than your own blighted pride.

And if you did, they deserved to be avenged.

Aud found she _could _get angry, after all.

"Warden." A dangerous note. "I will not permit you to ignore me."

"I'm frightening Lelianna." The left-hand tunnel, perhaps. Drag marks on the floor, and scratches on the walls where something metal had abraded the rock. "I heard you. And?"

"For all the -" Morrigan grabbed her wrist with one strong, callused hand. Aud found herself pinned by the witch's dark glare. "Oghren does not know you as I have come to," Morrigan said, cold and quiet. "My... friend. He has not noticed, or perhaps the disgusting little man merely does not care. But you are frightening the bard because Lelianna has seen, as I have seen, how hard you drive yourself and how distant you've become. You dwarves can talk all you like of the Stone, but you are not _made_ of it. And you did not look as though you thought you were, before we set out on our little excursion down here." As a biting afterthought: "And such a delightful trip it's been, too. Remind me to thank you for it properly, once we're back on the surface."

"I had not realised," Aud said, carefully - you had to be careful with Morrigan, especially when she was admitting to something as un-witchly as _worry_, which was, by the ancestors, what this conversation seemed to be about. _And if Morrigan's worried, what kind of shape am I _in_?_ - "that you troubled yourself much with Lelianna's feelings."

"And I had not realised," Morrigan said, softly, vicious, "that you troubled yourself so little with them. Or do you think I did not see how you look at her? Or, for that matter, how _she _looks at _you_? She trusts you, Warden. If you break yourself down here, it will ruin her."

"You think I'll break?"

"Aud." Morrigan's twisted smile held, for a wonder, something almost like compassion. "Everyone breaks."


	5. Waiting

"Like Carrion Men"

Taking a little break from Aeducan. We will return to the Deep Roads shortly.

* * *

**5. Interlude.**

Alistair hated Orzammar. Hate hate hatedy hate.

Well, okay. It wouldn't have been so bad if Aud hadn't left him on his _own_, dammit. He should've gone with them! Killing darkspawn was what a Grey Warden did. And he _was _a Grey Warden, wasn't he? He'd been in plenty of dangerous places before. These Deep Roads couldn't be that bad, could they?

He tried not to think about the look in Aud's eyes when she left. He'd seen her grim - in fact, he could probably count the number of times he'd seen her _un_grim without needing to take off his boots - but even when they fought the ogre at Ostagar, even when he'd pushed the responsibility of leadership onto her shoulders - and _Maker_, he'd felt such a coward for that, but he just couldn't, not after Duncan died - outside Flemeth's ramshackle hut, he'd never seen anything put fear in her eyes before.

Not that she'd ever admit it. That seemed to be a dwarf thing, not admitting fear. Or the fact that, _actually_, they were exiled princesses whose _own brother_ had arranged for them to be condemned to death. And here he'd been whining about how he didn't want to let Eamon make him Maric's heir.

Maker, she must think him craven when it came to responsibility. Maybe he was. He'd never had the fate of the _world _partly on his shoulders before. And Andraste preserve him, he didn't want a kingdom there, too.

And all he could do was pace around the Diamond Quarter and the Commons and fret. Harrowmont had given them rooms, after they'd dealt with the carta for him, so at least he wasn't spending all their money on sleeping in the overpriced rooms behind the tavern. But he couldn't shake the feeling people were watching him all the time.

Well, they probably were. He _had _turned up in the company of the exiled Aeducan daughter, after all, who'd immediately thrown them into the same politics that had gotten her exiled in the first place. And there weren't all that many six-foot blond templar-trained handsome Grey Wardens in Orzammar. Just one, in fact. Him.

_I should be in the Deep Roads with her. Lelianna's crazy, Morrigan's evil, and Oghren's obsessed. And crazy. How can she trust them to watch her back? How _can _she?_

At least the Proving Master let him take his frustration out on the pells below the Proving Ground. Otherwise, he was pretty sure he'd have already committed a one-man frontal assault on the Assembly in the name of _What part of _Blight _don't you people get?_ and _Why are you making one of Ferelden's last two Wardens risk her life to look for a mad-probably-dead Paragon when we have a Maker-be-damned _Blight_ on our hands?_

Which would be bad. Maker knew, Aud would probably follow him into the Fade and kill him all over again if he died and left her to clean up Ferelden's blighted mess without him. She knew how to hold a grudge.

* * *

Wynne did not know what she had expected from Orzammar.

She had not expected to find Alistair alone, with an expression on his face somewhere between misery and worn-out hope.

He met them in a vast hall lined with immense statues of stern-faced dwarves. The Hall of Heroes: she'd read of it. So these were the Paragons by whom Aud spent so much time swearing. Some of the Warden's curses were really quite inventive, although the image of the Paragon Ingvald hardly looked like the kind of man to sever his own penis and use it as a weapon.

"Wynne," he said, and clasped her hand. His eyes flicked to the qunari, silent at her back. "Sten. Good to see you."

Reaver whined, and Alistair almost grinned. "Sorry, boy. It's good to see you, too." The mabari thumped his tail, satisfied, and cocked his head. Alistair's grin faded. "Sorry, boy. She's not here."

"Alistair," Wynne said, as severely as she could manage. Being severe with Alistair was like kicking a puppy: you felt terrible about it, and nearly no one approved. Except for Morrigan. Morrigan, who was not alone in being conspicuously absent. "Where's Aud?"

"In the Deep Roads," he said, miserably. "She's been gone over a week. She wouldn't let me go with her. Wynne, I'm going crazy waiting for her."

"I can see," Wynne said, and tried to keep her concern from her voice, "that this is going to be a long story."

* * *

It was.

Told the way Alistair told things - back to front, with awkward stammerings, even more awkward digressions, and an allergy to answering difficult questions - it proved even longer than Wynne had anticipated.

Fortunately, the Warden (he was a nice young man, really, even if a little foolish at times) had the forethought to bring them back to the suite of rooms he occupied in Lord Harrowmont's estate, so that she and Sten could hear it in relative comfort.

"Wait," Wynne said, after the whole long tale had drawn itself to its present, worrying conclusion. _The Deep Roads... Well, Aud is a very competent young woman, and Morrigan does have a knack for survival, if nothing else. But I do wish they had been able to take more support with them._ "How did you get involved in dwarven politics in the _first _place?"

"Would you believe me if I said Lelianna had another vision from the Maker and told us to?" he said, hopefully.

"Alistair." Warningly.

"Oh, all right." A heavy sigh. "Aud." Alistair bit his lip. "I get the feeling we'd have gotten caught up in it no matter who we'd been - the deshyrs are deadlocked over who should be the next king, and it'd take months for things to sort themselves out in the usual manner of things, and the king's the only one who can order dwarves to fight on the surface - but, well. Aud. She's - she _was_, I should say: I gather dwarves are very thorough when casting someone out - an Aeducan. Endrin's daughter."

"Oh," Wynne said, faintly, and tried to settle _dwarven princess_ into her mental image of their battle-hardened leader. It fit strangely, like a robe trimmed too tight in the shoulders. For all her grim suspicion and occasional brutal expediency, the other Warden had something fundamentally honourable about her. Not something, from what Wynne had read, to be much expected in dwarven politics.

But then, none of those books had been written by dwarves. And humans did tend to exaggerate the vices of others. Possibly something had been left out. Perhaps she should investigate for herself, when Aud returned: there might be one last monograph in it, if she should live so long.

When Aud returned... Wynne pursed her lips. "When did Aud say we should expect her to return?"

Alistair had a stricken look. "She didn't. Just..."

"Just what?"

He inhaled, rather shakily. "Just that if you arrived and she didn't come back within six weeks, we should leave the Assembly to settle the question of the king, and go find the Dalish. _No point wasting time and resources_, she said. _Don't even think of coming after me_, she said."

"_Parshaara_," Sten growled, and Wynne was almost thankful for the gruff impatience. Alistair irritated was one thing. Alistair gloomy was quite another, and far less tolerable. "Enough of this foolishness. Tell me there is at least something useful for us to _do _while we wait."

* * *

There wasn't.


	6. Her Foundation and Her Sword

"Like Carrion Men"

_This seems not to know what tense it ought to be written in. I couldn't pick one and stay with it, so - lucky you - you get both._

* * *

**6.**

It was warm, the dark. It stank of carrion, old bones, the choking putrescent dust of tombs. And of darkspawn, a sick, acid wrongness that caught in Leliana's throat like bile.

_Many are those who wander in sin, despairing that they are lost forever - _She had been praying since their second night down here, singing the Chant of Light inside her head to still the beating terror of her thoughts. It helped, but not enough. Not when Aud's determined silence grew grimmer with every hour.

_But the one who repents, who has faith unshaken by the darkness of the world, and boasts not -_

Her quiver lay against her thigh. Her sword pressed the leather scale of her armour into her spine, its weight matched by her unstrung bow. Her left hand hurt from gripping her dagger like a talisman.

_- nor gloats over the misfortunes of the weak, but takes delight in the Maker's law and creations -  
_  
Aud's turn on point, Oghren's at the rear - the dwarves traded off, keeping the two human women between the shield of their bodies. It put Morrigan behind Leliana's shoulder, the witch muttering to herself, tiny sparks of lightning dancing absently between her fingers.

(Morrigan had protested their marching order. Once. Aud had said, _One hundred and twenty yards - give or take - ahead, the tunnel branches. One branch will swiftly grow too narrow to turn around in. One leads to an open cavern. And one will cave in on our heads if we so much as _breathe _wrong while we're in it. If you have stone-sense enough to tell one from the other, by all means, take a turn in front._)  
_  
- she shall know the peace of the Maker's benediction._

Aud strode two paces ahead, a dim figure in the lichen-light from the rock walls. (_Light attracts attention, _she'd said, when Leliana'd voiced discomfort at the permanent gloom. _No light unless we're fighting, or unless you can't see at all._ It had been the most words she'd spoken all that day.)

Leliana wanted - blessed Andraste, she wanted so _very_ badly - to reach out and take the Warden's hand. On the surface, with the sun on her back or the moon making a play of shadows in the clouds, she would've done so without hesitation, and they would both have pretended it was only Leliana who craved the reassurance of touch. (Not more. Of course not. Well, maybe just a _little_ more. The dwarf was striking indeed - not beautiful, but ah, such charisma! In her former life, Leliana would've seduced her in all joy: the buried heat in Aud's gold-dark eyes was poorly hidden, from one who knew how to look.)

_The Light shall lead her safely through the paths of this world, and into the next -_

But in this dark hole Aud had retreated, day by day. Walled herself up behind a mask of silences and shadows and a grimness so cold Leliana found herself afraid to probe beneath the ice, because Aud Aeducan was dwarven, and dwarves _did not_ fear the dark.

_They threw her down here to die, Leliana, _she reminded herself. _Her family. Her father. Even courteous Lord Harrowmont, stiff with his honour and his pride. And maybe finding the Grey Wardens here was perhaps not so simple as she made it sound, no? Maybe it was a closer thing than she will admit, here in the dark._

Morrigan had said it, in one of their rare conversations. _'Tis hardly a pleasure jaunt for any of us, but for our fearless leader? I, for one, would hardly care to revisit the site of my execution. _(And then she'd sniffed, and pretended she hadn't said something that hinted at the slightest kind of softness. Of a certainty, Morrigan would never admit to _that_.)

_For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water. As the moth sees light and goes toward flame, she should see fire and go towards Light -_

They rounded a corner of the tunnel. A ruined vision opened up before them; a city like Orzammar, crumbling, cast down. Despoiled.

"_Branka,_" Aud snarled. The bay of a warhound belled in her voice.

_The Veil holds no uncertainty for her, and she will know no fear of death, for the Maker shall be her beacon and her shield -_

Leliana gripped her weapons in her sweat-slick hands, and made ready to do battle at her leader's side.

* * *

Aud is quicksilver and lightning in the golem's shadow.

Caridin is not the largest living - if indeed a golem can be said to live - thing Leliana has ever seen: that honour goes to a dragon. But he _is _the most massive, grinding stone joints and a tread that trembles the ground underfoot. His voice is the hollow rumble of cave-ins and earthquakes, dreadful with ancient regret and duty. Leliana pities him, and Aud -

It's in her eyes. Aud _mourns_, even as she fights.

Branka is a ruin of a Paragon. If she were ever anything but mad, that day is long past. And Caridin -

Caridin is worse than a ruin of a Paragon. He is a Paragon betrayed, abandoned, clinging to the remnants of duty through centuries alone.

_This_, Leliana realises, thinking with a small, distant part of her mind even as she strings her bow in the cover of a boulder, and looses. After so many weeks the rhythm of battle is automatic to her, and she does not need to think to fight. _This _is what Aud fears. Branka's madness, and Caridin's lonely fate.

Not death, but surviving the destruction of one's _self_.

A second time.

_Oh_, she thinks, and does not understand why it feels as though her heart is breaking.

* * *

When it is done, Branka lies bloody and broken on the ground, and the Anvil of the Void - the Anvil is as destroyed as one determined dwarf with a warhammer can make it.

Oghren stands silent, with the haggard face of a wounded man who has had a long time to see the mortal blow coming before it fell. Morrigan is disapproving. But the list of things of which Morrigan approves is very short, and usually involves either killing things, or sarcasm.

Preferably both.

_May you always find your way in the dark._

Caridin falls.

Like a stone falls, not like a star. There is no grace in it, and Leliana sees knives twist in Aud's eyes as the Warden turns her back on the crevasse and cradles the crown he forged to her chest.

"Come," Leliana says, softly, on impulse, and lays a gentle hand on Aud's shoulder. "It is time for us to go see the sun again, yes?"

They have had their fill of darkness.


	7. Caridin's Crown

"Like Carrion Men"

_Yep. Been a while. And I still don't know what tense I'm in, so we're going with present._

_We'll see if I manage to tie this up in another couple of scenes, or if it will take another couple of months.  
_

* * *

**7.**

Orzammar must change or die.

Oh, _ancestors_, she has been a fool not to have seen this before. When every year fewer warriors and nobles come back from the killing expeditions in the Deep Roads, the ones that keep the darkspawn back from the gate; when more and more abandon the Stone for the surface and not just dusters, but high caste dwarva with _prospects_. When the Legion of the Dead marches out into the Deep Roads, dead men and women going to their doom reclaim their honour, and the halls of Orzammar grow ever quieter, the faint odour of the taint in the rock ever stronger. Tradition will not hold it back.

Trian would have made a terrible king.

On those grounds, so will Pyral Harrowmont.

Aud tells stories, on the way back from Ortan Thaig. Endrin Stonehammer. The Last Stand of Kal'Hirol. The Fall of Thaig Aeducan. It passes the time, between darkspawn attacks. It eases some of the strain in Morrigan's features that Aud has not noticed until it starts to relax. It distracts Oghren from his brooding into long, involved arguments - sometimes carried on into the middle of a fight, and trying not to get herself spitted laughing when the drunken warrior beheads a genlock emissary and turns to berate her on the finer points of history is one of the hardest things she's ever done. And it draws Leliana out of the tense, silent shell into which the bard has retreated, until she's trading stories in turn, and Aud counts that amongst her better achievements.

Her own pain and pride cannot be allowed to rule her. Look at Branka's pride. Look at _Caridin's_. She can't afford pride. She cannot let _tradition_ grind Orzammar into dust: she is no longer an Aeducan, and never will be again, not even if by some Stone-bound miracle the Assembly gives her back her name. The taint is in her blood, and the Wardens need her.

Bhelen might be a Stone-bound snake, but she must admit he understands _necessity_ as well as ambition. He has never, at least, been blind.

* * *

They come up from the Deep Roads rank and stinking. Blood crusts their armour, and the reek of the taint follows them like a cloud.

The guards at Orzammar's gate give way before them. Aud sets her teeth and strides through the entrance to the Diamond Quarter, Oghren and Leliana at her shoulders, Morrigan fierce and watchful in the rear. They have discussed this. Appearances are important, and this march straight from the Deep Roads to the Assembly will leave a lasting impression. Aud intends it to.

Their progress draws a crowd. Alistair is among them. And Wynne. And Sten. She swallows her relief - they're safe, they're alive, talking will wait - and tries not to snarl at Alistair's horrified expression. "Aud -"

"_Later_," she snaps, hard and quiet. "For now, fall in."

Reaver comes to her heel, and Alistair does as he's told, for once without arguing. She shoves through the doors of the Assembly, the guards here falling back before her just as the ones at the entrance to the city. Darkspawn blood is caked in her hair, smeared like warpaint across her cheeks, and the deshyrs stutter into silence as she claims the chamber floor.

She looks like a nightmare. It is what they have made her, they and the Blight between them. Let them _remember_ this.

She has nightmares enough on their account.

Harrowmont is in his seat, his controlled expression hinting at satisfaction. Bhelen stands under the Aeducan banner. Her brother has always been hard to read, but she thinks he is wary. It would be justice if he died by her decision here. Not that politics have ever had much to do with justice.

"Orzammar must change or die." Her words ring in the silence. It is her battlefield voice, by choice: harsh and angry like the cry of some carrion bird. Caridin's crown is heavy between her hands. "I carry a crown forged by the Paragon Caridin for its rightful king." She throws it underhand, fast and vicious, at Bhelen, and has the satisfaction of seeing him rock back in bewilderment. The words curdle her throat. A dull clamour starts in the back of the hall. "Bhelen Aeducan! Serve your people better than our father did, _brother_, or by the bones of the ancestors, I'll send you home to the Stone to join him!"

She turns on her heel and marches out. This is not her place anymore, and she has other things to do.

She really, really wants a bath.


End file.
